Trident Alternatives Review: the elephant in the room

The recent Trident
Alternatives Review excludes any consideration of alternative means that
might provide effective deterrence and more reliable security for Britain in
the 21st century. It's time for an intelligent public and political debate.

Main Gate, AWE Aldermaston, where the UK nuclear warheads are made.Photo: Author's (c)

The Coalition government’s long-awaited “Trident
Alternatives Review" (TAR) was published on 16 July. It provided a detailed summary of the costs
and problems associated with various kinds of land- sea- or air-based nuclear
weapons that might replace the UK’s current Trident system. Though it makes no
direct recommendations, the Review points towards a Hobson’s choice of Trident
like-for-like, building 4 new submarines that would cling to Cold War doctrines
of “continuous at-sea deterrence” patrols (CASD), or “Trident Lite”, with 2 or
3 submarines and recognition that there is no necessity to have a nuclear-armed
submarine at sea at all times.

Going back to land-based and air-dropped nuclear bombs was
recognised to be foolish. Though some Liberal Democrats expressed interest in
dual-capable sea-based cruise missiles, these would be retrogressive,
destabilising and prohibitively expensive to develop and deploy, requiring the
“Astute” submarine fleet to be adapted. Like Trident, sea-based cruise missiles
would leave UK nuclear policy dependent on the United States and probably
Scotland as well, since Faslane is also the best-adapted port for Astute submarines,
as pointed out in “Worse
than Irrelevant”, a prescient Acronym Institute report that analysed all
the options before the 2006 White Paper.

Purporting to project a timeframe out to 2060, the TAR
failed to give any thought to international developments that would make
Trident replacement utterly pointless, and deliberately excluded analysis of
nuclear disarmament and using non-nuclear means to meet Britain’s security
challenges for the 21st century.

A thought experiment: a smoker addicted to high-priced
cigars, repeatedly tells the world of his desire to make the world smoke free
and dissuade the kids from taking up this dangerous habit. Sharing this ambition and not liking cigars,
the smoker’s spouse suggests that as a first step towards joining the majority
of non-smokers, it would be good to analyse the pros and cons, including what
cigars actually do and whether something else could be a safer substitute. Instead, the smoker agrees to a detailed
study of other smoking materials – cigarettes, pipes, roll-ups etc., including
comparing their prices and the intensity of the comfort level or high they
impart (the use of a gendered pronoun is not, in these circumstances,
accidental). Though the doctor, lawyer
and many other friends and neighbours encouraged him to consider life without
smoking, he adamantly excluded from the study any consideration of alternatives
that would provide better highs and more secure relationships with fewer (if
any) health, environmental and economic risks.
Having adopted a narrow mandate that permitted consideration of
different types of smoking materials only, it is unsurprising that such a ‘Cigar
Alternatives Review’ reinforced this smoker’s preference for cigars, though
perhaps he could cut down a bit.

Permitted to study only nuclear weapons, but encouraged to
consider “value for money”, the TAR adopted a Cold War definition of deterrence
and considered what alternative to Trident might provide “a minimum nuclear
deterrent capability that, during a crisis, is able to deliver at short notice
a nuclear strike against a range of targets at an appropriate scale and with
very high confidence”. Defined like
that, it is unsurprising that the Cabinet Office study promotes the Trident
devil they already know, though perhaps a bit smaller. The TAR’s basic
assumptions expose how outdated UK nuclear policy is. In a world of economic integration, international
interdependencies and shared environmental challenges, UK planners are still
bleating on about needing nuclear weapons to convince a potential aggressor
that the UK could deliver “unacceptable loss”, which the TAR seems to think is
a good thing. In the real world outside
the circular groupthink of nuclear debates in Britain and France, diplomats in countries ranging from Norway
to Mexico, Indonesia to South Africa, are bemused to find these strange, Cold
War notions still forming the basis for nuclear decision-making.

A very different writing is on the wall internationally,
epitomised by the decision by the United Nations to set up a new ‘open-ended
working group’ on nuclear disarmament at the Palais des Nations in Geneva, and
next month's nuclear disarmament ‘High Level Meeting’ of governmental heads of
state at the UN Headquarters in New York.
These initiatives follow on from the heightened concerns about the
humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapons raised at the 2010
Conference of states parties to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, the consensus resolution by the Red
Cross and Red Crescent societies which called for nuclear weapons to be
prohibited, and a ground-breaking
conference in Oslo in March 2013, at which 127 governments and a score of
international agencies and experts discussed the humanitarian
impacts of nuclear weapons.

Given all parties’ stated commitment to the NPT and
apparent policy preferences for multilateral over “unilateral” steps, we might
have expected a positive UK response.
But no, the TAR shows this government to be hell bent on unilaterally
replacing Trident, in effect sticking two fingers up to the multilateral
disarmament efforts of other NPT states.
Worse still, the UK allowed itself to be dragged by other
nuclear-armed states, notably France, into boycotting not only the Oslo
Conference on humanitarian impacts of nuclear weapons but the UN
General Assembly discussions on nuclear disarmament as well.

The Liberal Democrat heavyweight on security matters, Sir
Nick Harvey, told an NPT meeting in Geneva that the UK boycott was a “serious
strategic error”. Initially appointed
as Defence Minister in the Coalition government, charged with leading the TAR,
Harvey had suggested that the Review could map out a way for the UK to “step
down” the nuclear ladder. Following
his ignominious dismissal from this post (with an apparently compensatory
knighthood), the Liberal Democrats had to put a brave
face on the situation, as David Cameron set the TAR back on the Tories’
preferred track – a PR exercise to reinforce the pro-Trident lobby.

Never underestimate the military-industrial stranglehold by
defence contractors such as BAE Systems (which demands new submarine contracts
for the Barrow shipyard despite being behind
and over cost in its delivery of the current Astute submarines) and US arms
giants Jacobs Engineering and Lockheed Martin, which (together with SERCO)
comprise two-thirds of the privatised management consortium that runs the UK’s
“Atomic Weapons Establishments” (AWE) at Aldermaston and Burghfield. These companies, together with Rolls Royce in Derby, and a
few others, stand to profit from Trident replacement. The jobs involved are few
and far between compared with the jobs that are being lost due to the cuts in
the armed forces, health and other areas of manufacturing that are currently
being decimated. They will be the main
beneficiaries of this TAR, from which the Tories excluded any consideration of
alternative means that might provide effective deterrence and more reliable
security for Britain in the 21st century. As a result, the no-replacement option, coupled with active
engagement in multilateral disarmament efforts, is the elephant in the TAR’s
room, as a recent CND
report makes clear.

Had the Coalition government been willing to take into
account international proliferation, security and disarmament developments over
the past few decades, the Cabinet Office might have recognised that the best
option for British security and cohesion would be to let go of nuclear weapons
dependency. The UK would then be able
to take the lead in multilateral efforts to ban and eliminate nuclear weapons,
thereby strengthening the non-proliferation and disarmament goals that the UK
claims to support in the NPT.

Yet, British media and the Labour, Conservative and Liberal
Democrat Parties seem bent on suppressing debate on the real options for UK
nuclear and security policy. Instead
they act as if Scottish independence is the main problem. This is
short-sighted.

In a weird twist, both UK Prime Minister David Cameron and
Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond (leader of the Scottish National Party)
seem keen to portray a vote for independence as a vote for getting rid of
Trident, though Cameron of course calls it “the British deterrent”. Either way, this equation isn’t
automatically correct. Opposition to Trident in Scotland is currently running at
more than twice the level of support for independence. If, despite the efforts of some of its
members, NATO continues to be a nuclear-dependent alliance, then an independent
Scotland seeking to join NATO (as the SNP leadership recently decided in the teeth
of strong opposition from the party’s grassroots) might come under pressure to
lease Faslane to the UK. On the other hand, pressure to make Scotland nuclear
free would be likely to intensify if the SNP lost the independence vote,
scheduled for 2014. Any Scottish government would have to weigh the deep
unpopularity of acceding to pressure from the UK or NATO to lease the Faslane
base for nuclear weapons in the future. With over 80 percent of Scots opposed
to the continued deployment and storage of nuclear weapons at Faslane and
Coulport, Trident's days are numbered with or without Scottish
independence.

In a world where nuclear weapons are being progressively
stigmatised and eliminated, it is ridiculous to reduce the important decisions
on UK nuclear policy to the Scottish vote on independence or the number of
nuclear submarines the government might
or might not be able to afford. This TAR, like the sham 2010
Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR), is a lost opportunity to
generate an intelligent public and political debate about the role and
consequences of nuclear weapons for the UK and internationally.

The UK needs a debate that doesn’t get reduced to submarine
numbers and an internecine “angels on a pinhead” debate over Continuous at-Sea
Deterrence (CASD) and other doctrinal articles of deterrence belief that have
been irrelevant (albeit expensive) for the past 30 years already. To bring about a genuine debate to assess
the role of nuclear weapons in UK and international security, Ed Miliband has to move Labour beyond the
fears engendered by the historically false but deep-seated belief that nuclear
disarmament is a vote loser.

This is the
first of a series of articles by Rebecca Johnson on the UK nuclear debate.

Read more
articles by Rebecca Johnson on the events and debates on Nuclear Non-Proliferation
and Disarmament

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